the nights that never die
by Aiko Isari
Summary: Taichi and Hikari are normal children with normal parents. This is a complete fallacy. A story before Simple Math.


_Warnings for blood, death, violence, grief and grieving, near death experience, non human characters, mentions of sex, mentions of pregnancy, two f-bombs, and blue and orange morality_

* * *

Taichi has always been robust.

He outruns most of the local boys, he plays their games alongside them even though that's true, he's a little hardier. If he's a little dirty, a little extra competitive, it's taken as roughhousing boys too wild for their own good that were still learning their manners.

They don't take Yagami Yuuko's smile over her slowly growing belly as anything but what it is.

They don't see the sharp teeth until a boy screams his arms is bleeding and the boy looks like he's not been bitten but mauled.

Taichi? Taichi is sweetly confused and unaware. He hadn't bitten. He tastes no blood in his mouth.

He remembers nothing.

Certainly, Yuuko is concerned but… he's already wrapping bandages around their arm with clumsy fingers and wiping tears. The amber sheen is back to brown.

So Yagami Yuuko's eyes remain plain and brown and not endless ocean blue. But she is filled with pride nevertheless.

* * *

It'd be easy to say, of course, that Yagami Yuuko had met Yagami Susumu at a bar, at the office, at the most boring college class.

It would also be a lie. Yagami Yuuko and Yagami Susumu met at the beach. Her limbs were weak from another transfer still and so the form was not as hardy as she would have liked and so she stumbled in the water and dropped from view from her friends, feeble, mortal, fragile, as she looked and really wasn't. But this would be a problem. Being exposed so soon would ruin all of her hopes and dreams, the potential of seeing humanity in its habitat.

But he had dove in, like a fool. Partying with his friends, enjoying the guilt free summer while they had it. And of course, he's a good swimmer and of course he's strong enough in his thin arms and normal body that's not normal at all, kicking harder than a human should be able to kick and they are going, going until blissfully good oxygen fills her lungs again and she's looking at brown eyes, soft, ordinary brown.

He looks so human but Yuuko knows in her _gut_ that he isn't.

She's sure of it when he helps her back to shore, laughing sheepishly with his friends and waving at her own as they huddle around her like hungry seagulls. Yuuko makes extra effort to cough up water, and watches his eyes turn rust red.

Yuuko smiles. He returns it.

* * *

She doesn't ask why his name is Susumu or why he's here. He asks her about hers, often, interspersed with little comments about human world seashells and the strangeness of their phones.

He does tell her that he is a time traveler.

He tells her he lost someone he loved, and his brother is hurting so much because of it. And there's no way to stem what he too feels.

"She loved," he says sometimes with a wry smile, sometimes with one old and fragile and _angry. "_ She was very good at love."

Still, he always asks her how she came to be here and she won't tell him. She really can't. She can't explain a longing that isn't real. She can't explain how, for an instant, she remembered someone that may not have existed. That she'd had someone, anyone, who had met her once or twice and then never again. She can't explain how she's never lost that longing because she doesn't understand it herself.

So now she is here to seek out happiness and peace from the wars of all wars. And she may have found a piece of it.

* * *

She loves human education.

Susumu finds it all ridiculous even though he does it to match her step for step. "They can charge money for this," he scoffs. " _Money._ For knowledge."

"It's a bartering system with substitutions," she counters with a brilliant laugh. Because he loves the sound of her laughter and her friends think he has the dopiest grin when he hears it. (He does, but she won't tell him.) "The Digital World is just more straightforward."

"At least in the Digital World it can be argued as memory storage rather than useless paper and coin," he grumbles, still smiling that silly, adorable smile of his.

"It's still a form of currency," she says and laughs again at the utter betrayal he wears.

* * *

He goes to work in the human world. He goes into business, his ultimate irony.

Only then does she meet his brother, a little high school student with demon fire at his back when he thinks no one is looking. It makes his hair curl.

"Be good to him," he demands on the very first meeting. "Or I'll roast you with a stick through your mouth and eat you in public."

"He won't," Susumu offers from his pile of homework. "He can't cook without thinking of _balut_ six times out of ten _._ "

The boy gags and runs from the room, screaming rage through his use of the toilet bowl.

Yuuko rolls her eyes. She hopes her hatchlings won't be quite this terrible to each other.

(They will be, she knows, but they will love each other just as much.)

* * *

Her brother in law to be is a Demon. A Demon Lord.

"An extra," the young man dismisses. "There's like, seventy of us at any given time. People raise us from eggs. It's just the specific ones that cause problems when they die."

Seeing a human youth so apathetic is morbid, but she supposes it's fair. He's older than he looks.

"Besides, if I die, who will keep my brother from black holing the universe?"

"More worried about you doing that, to be honest."

Izumi Mitsuru squints at her. Then he grins. "Changed my mind, I like you."

Then his adoptive, human cousin or other calls him away from the nice college student she is. And he's gone again, grinning through reddish-purple hair and telling them all about the fun things she taught him about _math._

"He doesn't understand the point of blending in," Susumu replies when she comes back from lunch, baffled at the stupidity of him. "Or subtlety, if I'm honest."

"He'll break some hearts by the time he's twenty-four," Yuuko decides, and goes back to trying to decipher more of human biology. Menstruation sounds awful.

She never asks who Susumu is. He will just tell her later.

* * *

"Did you really just call what we did, the human sex?"

Yuuko stares at him with fond exasperation, even more amused by the way Susumu's ears turn a tomato-red and he looks away.

"Is there something wrong with that?"

"Yes," she says in the most matter-of-fact way she can. "The lack of a marriage in progress."

He has the gall to laugh at her.

* * *

The wedding is almost empty.

No one brings up parents but her friends bring theirs, who cry over her like she's their own and not the girl they let stay in their house because she lied well.

They were her best friends. Hell, Toshiko and Haruhiko were married already. And they knew nothing. They could know nothing. They couldn't know she wasn't like them at all.

Besides, they wouldn't believe her anyway.

* * *

Taichi is born from, as her husband lovingly calls it, the human sex. And quite frankly, human pregnancy is _astonishing._

She's very glad when it's over. Very glad because there he is, a screaming little thing.

Screaming and setting things on fire.

Mitsuru takes days off of work to help her not die, while green with envy. He can't help himself, she knows. He's awfully lonely, as a devil may care mathematics professor.

He needs to stop recommending knives. Taichi is an _infant_. A godly infant but still. He can't hold knives yet. He needs at least a year with those motor skills.

… Maybe two, the way he keeps trying to knock over the lamp with his face.

* * *

"I screwed up." Mitsuru, covered in dirt, caked blood, and what's left of his clothes, slumps in their doorway, unnoticed as they have left this.

"You look like it."

Yuuko, in her son's room, doesn't ask. She knows better.

"He killed his wife," Susumu calls through the doorway.

" _He did what?"_ She hisses it because Taichi is a terror to convince to sleep until he's actually on the soft covers

"I did not! I did exactly what the human laws said! By the book! The _truck_ , may the asshole burn, did not."

Yuuko wishes she was allowed to drink.

Taichi starts crying, that screeching lion cat sound she knows from experience.

"Can I do what he's doing?" Mitsuru begs.

"You can go get your son first," Susumu says, still mildly voiced as he likely pulls out the rubbing alcohol.

"They already sent him away and burnt the corpses. I don't know _where_ he is."

Yuuko knows exactly where Izumi Koushiro is because she had seen him this morning being babysat by a relative, that whomever it was that had adopted the idiot now nursing a hot cocoa on their couch.

She also knows he won't see his son without pain of death because he doesn't do what his mother would have told him to and kept the bonds he had.

She prays the son is actually smarter than the father this go around, and not simply good at math.

* * *

Mitsuru heals slow, and bloody. He goes back home. He comes back once a year, with weapons, shields, anything.

At one point, he comes home with a strange scarf.

"Some girl gave it to me."

It's dismissive, but for some reason, Susumu laughs his head off.

"Some girl yes," he says.

Mitsuru – Roni – grumbles at him. "Don't joke. That busybody."

"That she is."

Yuuko -again – doesn't ask. She knows she will find out soon enough. She always does.

* * *

Taichi was born from, as Susumu calls it, the human sex. This second child will not be.

Still, it grows like one. They buy a bunk bed where the child will eventually sleep with their toddler of a son, who is immediately _obsessed._ Mastering human form had taken him so long and the words a little less, so he's babbling it to her and the baby that will come every day.

Like right now, in which he tells her (he's sure it's a girl even though no one cares) human blood is _gross_ even though he really doesn't remember it very well. He knows he did something so he does not recommend the biting though.

The child doesn't really stir. It worries her.

* * *

She was right to worry.

This is much more painful than Taichi, so much more. It's like death is trying to eat her and child both. It's like that moment vague in her memories has come anew and it's worse than the last time.

She bleeds her life out on to the floor and it might end, it really might and she can't stand that, not with everyone she loves and everything she's waiting for. She can't break them both after Mitsuru's already fallen apart.

She sighs though the pain and something warm and cold and light and dark brushes up against her head. Then it moves lower, delicate fingers touching the roughness of her stomach and then and then-

A voice, ethereal, so young, impossibly so. _don't worry, I have her. I've got her and you a little. Just push on, soldier on. That one waits yet._

And she does. Yuuko finds strength in muscles that don't exist in a digimon and do in the human heart.

Yagami Hikari, born shining like the sun her brother expelled with ease and joy, lets out a shrieking cry, searching for oxygen.

* * *

Susumu, trapped by his daughter's tiny, flailing limbs, can only laugh.

To be fair his son had also claimed a knee and a hip, but that's not much. His daughter has taken him to equal a sleeping spot and he can't help but enjoy it.

"You're getting soft."

Mitsuru - Roni, Demon, brother, so many names – looks down at him from the couch, reading a book. His anger's better now. The self-loathing, not so much, but that's fine isn't it? Nobody is perfect.

"I was never hard," Susumu counters.

"Durante."

Taichi stares at his uncle, big eyes and solemn mouth and it bothers Susumu. His children need to smile.

"Taichi, take her to bed," he says.

Taichi beams because yes, he is _good_ at looking after his sister, even when she rolls on his pudding or makes a messy diaper, he's so good and he loves her and though she can't really talk yet, she loves him.

When he's toddled away, Susumu sits up. "What, Roni?"

"You're not building up your army anymore." His voice, unaged despite the rest of him, builds into the old Terriermon warble. "You hardly stay in the ocean. You work with these… these people. You know what they'll do, you know what they're doing _right now._ She'll be going up there and we can still stop them, we can still-"

"Then go and do it." Susumu feels the anger build behind his eyes, the water wash over his slippers. "Go, Roni. Go change everything, go save her. Gods know you won't save your son-"

"He's happy!"

"He'd be happier if he met you, if he knew you, if he loved you and _you know it."_

"He would not! That-" Roni pauses. "That has nothing to do with this and stop distracting me!"

"But it's ever so easy." Susumu drawls.

Roni scowls and shuts his book. "Why are you playing house like this?"

"Because it would make her happy, Roni." Susumu sags back on the floor. "Because I am happy and because if mother saw me now she would cry with joy because I let her go."

"And have you?" His voice warbles again, wavering because his little brother can throw fire around all he wants but he is a damn crybaby.

Susumu looks at Mitsuru, eyes blood red and colder than the arctic zones his mother despised so much. "I never will."

Roni turns away from it, but his shoulders lower a bit and eventually, he asks Susumu to show him how the blender works.

Yuuko pretends she heard nothing and the mopped up water came from Taichi knocking over a vase that was already replaced.

* * *

Someone left Hikari a whistle. She talks to Taichi with it, to them with it sometimes.

Then, one day, they hear her voice loud and clear across the tiny apartment. "Fuck!"

The silence could kill a man.

"She meant to say frog," Taichi tells them, watching said animal hop across the screen.

"Fuck!" Hikari repeats. She sounds pleased with herself.

Mitsuru flees, Yuuko chases him down the stairs, and Susumu laughs until he cries.

She doesn't say anything else for another three months but that's fine. It's better than her cursing.

* * *

"Human alcohol is disgusting why do they shove it on me?"

Yuuko pities him really, watches him nurse a ginger ale. "You're in business, darling, it comes with the territory."

"It shouldn't," he grumbles. Then he sniffs. "Did you buy eggs?"

"I didn't, no." She pats his back. "You're smelling through the fridge, love. Get to bed."

Susumu shakes his head, oddly defiant. "No, I could swear-"

That's when the entire back of their apartment explodes.

Alcohol forgotten, everything forgotten, they rush over and their balcony is broken, their children's home ruined and Hikari is gone.

And Taichi darts past them. "Agumon kidnapped Hikari!" is all he shouts before he's gone.

They look at each other.

Then they're right after him, after of course calling the police and telling them a terrorist attacked their house. They'd believe it, the government believed anything sensational enough.

* * *

They're too late, even with the car and instead there's a little girl sitting with them in the ruins of Hikarigaoka, telling them stories and dancing sparks over her hands. From here, Yuuko sees her dark skin is wet with sweat and something red on the back of her neck.

Susumu however, sees an entirely different red as he rushes out of the borrowed car.

"You," he says, heavy and tired and even a little dark against the sunrise.

The girl looks up at him, smile fading into something different, something like a frown. "This' the second time now, Durante. Yer slippin' in yer family life."

"Shut it, you busybody." His ears are red again and he looks away as he scoops them up in his arms. Both children go without complaint.

"You distracted me from sommat important," the girl says. Unperturbed. "'s not like I didn't have other people to save t'night."

"Then why didn't you?" The look on his round face is chilly and worn out.

The girl looks at him a moment more, then she sighs. "'m too old fer this. You _know_ why. Ya just don' wanna think about it. Tha's fine I guess. But you know it'll come. This either has to be real, or it ain't. And you need ta choose."

"And what are my choices?"

The girl laughs. "Like I know 'r care. They made theirs. Be proud!" Her cheer vanishes like a tear into the earth. "Or somethin' I guess. Anyway, yer here now, so I'll go." She turns away, to walk into the setting sun.

"Come back?"

She glances back, joining the rest of the eyes looking at Hikari, whose sleepy eyes are too red for comfort. Then the girl grins, purple hair floating a little as a breeze passes by. "If ya wish real hard, I'll come runnin', okay?"

And then she's gone. Gone as the monsters who must have been.

* * *

Yagami Yuuko remembers in a dream, a woman named Taeko.

She remembers a woman named Taeko who died in her flipper arms.

She remembers a woman showing her the way home and two people calling her that name.

She remembers leaving. She remembers starting over.

She forgets to remember. She is not prepared for that little letter in their new mailbox, a little girl's birthday party.

Mochizuki Meiko looks at her searchingly through the photograph and Yuuko weeps for Taeko all over again.

Susumu finds her in that state, children sleeping on the sofa, and doesn't ask.

* * *

Taichi and Hikari are normal children with normal parents.

This is a complete fallacy.

Taichi and Hikari are abnormal children with loving parents and friends in high places. And that is all they can ask for when the sun rises again. And when it falls over their heads.

* * *

 ** _A/N:_ **Rest in peace canon for now you are dead. This is the accursed _dadgomon au,_ courtesy of my Digimon All Star server and co. Ya'll hate me yet?

yes this is going into simple math so you'd _better hate me._ Anyway, read, review, all that fun stuff! thanks all! Also if you are reading this, you are free to read ch 2 of Simple Math once it comes out.

Challenges: Diversity Writing A/M F19, Mini fic 02 oneshots list 4.


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